| HEARTBREAKERS Release Date: 24/08/2001 Certificate: 15 Official Website Director: David Mirkin Producers: John David & Irving Ong Screenplay: Robert Dunn, Paul Guay & Stephen Mazur |
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| This is a chickflick, and my only defence for going to see it is that I did take a fit girl. Another fit girl is of course the delectably pouty and perfectly-formed Jennifer Love Hewitt. Hewitt plays Page Conners, one half of a duo of con artists. Sigourney Weaver plays her mother, Maxine, who finds rich men to marry. Under the pretence of her religious beliefs not allowing to her to get her portions before she ties the knot, she then leaves her new husband frustrated on their wedding night. At which point the gorgeous Page enters the equation in tight and revealing |
| apparel. Maxine walks in and the next thing the poor sap knows he's in the divorce courts losing half his fortune. The problem with this is that Sigourney Weaver is not an attractive woman, and the whole premise of the movie kind of rests on the assumption that she is. Her "comic" honeymoon antics in finding ways not to sleep with Ray Liotta's dodgy car-chopper Dean Cummano is as distasteful as it is amusing. She is too old. I'd be the first to admit that she the make-up department did a damn good job on her in Galaxy Quest, but Weaver has never been what you'd call sex siren material. |
| Fortunately the Jennifer is eminently watchable in some very sexy outfits and oozing sexual confidence as Page. As the movie begins it is quite funny, mother and daughter are both humourously sociopathic and ruthless. But the story quickly loses its way and descends into dull parent/child angst, as Page wants make her own way in the world and falls in love with Jack (Jason Lee). Gene Hackman takes a memorable and scene-stealing role as lecherous, chain-smoking old millionaire William B. Tensy, his death-rattle cough punctuating his performance throughout. Liotta makes a decent comic turn too, but I find it worryingly difficult to watch him without thinking him about him with the top of his head sawn off (a la Hannibal). An overlong "black" romantic comedy that fails to live up to its early promise and wusses out into a love story. 4/10. |
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